Submitted photo of Mike Roselle and James McGuiness peacefully protesting at the Cherry Pond Mountain.
Two members of Climate Ground Zero were arrested for interfering with blasting at Clays Branch.
Clays Branch is part of Cherry Pond Mountain, which stretches east along Rt 3 to Bolt Mountain and is located above Marsh Fork Elementary School, close to a 2.8 billion gallon coal sludge impoundment at Shumate.
The arrests and citation occurred on Monday, Feb. 16 at approximately 11:00 a.m.
Those arrested were Mike Roselle and James McGuinness.
“We have yet to appear on the citations. I’m not sure what is going to happen; I think it’s a maximum $100 fine, although we have no intention of paying any fines,” Roselle told the Coal Valley News.
“People are writing and calling in from all over the country to ask what they can do to help us,” he said. “We feel this is the only choice we have. The courts and the politicians here in West Virginia are in the pockets of the coal industry. We feel that anything that we’ve done is relatively minor to what they’re doing.”
“You can see Coal River mountain from the site. You can look down and see the dam. It is right above Marsh Fork Elementary School. That is our main concern; if that dam fails because of the explosion, it will be catastrophic,” he said.
“If the blasting continues, and the Shumate Dam was to fail, the lives of thousands of West Virginians would be at risk,” he stated.
When asked about Monday’s protests, Roselle said, “We had originally wanted to approach the drill rig.” Instead, according to Roselle, the men sat down in front of a truck and blocked it from driving up the road
“They thought that there was another group of us up there, and as a result of that they were not able to blast yesterday,” he said. Roselle said he was uncertain if the coal mine would continue blasting on Tuesday at 4:00 p.m but said regardless, he and other activists were in for the long-haul.
“We are going to continue our campaign of civil disobedience until it is stopped,” he said.
When asked to clarify if he meant just the halt to blasting on Coal River Mountain or all MTR practices, Roselle said, “All mountain top removal in general,”
Activists are protesting the blasting on the Massey Energy-owned Edwhite mountain top removal site near the Shumate Dam on Cherry Pond Mountain.
The Shumate dam is a Class-C dam which holds 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge, the waste by-product of chemically cleaning coal, and sits above the Marsh Fork elementary school.
Since 2005, local citizens have demanded that Marsh Fork Elementary School be moved to protect the children from a massive dam failure like the one that happened in Kingston, Tennessee three months ago, on Dec. 22 of last year.
“This is a crime against nature”, James McGuinness stated in a press release, “It is not only illegal, it is immoral. They have no right to destroy this mountain.”
Spokespersons at Massey Energy were unavailable for comment at the time of this printing.
then your opinion might be alot different. i was born and raised in pond fork and i applaude them for their efforts.
We need a law where trepassing is enforceable with long terms in jail (45-90 days) with no chance of getting out.
These lowlifes continue as always to disobey laws for their cause.
It's time they were made to either protest by law (with permits) or be run out of the area-they are cankers of the worse kind.
Or even better send these idiots to Iraq or Afghanistan and let them protest over there.